


Flying

by dutchydoescoke



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-22
Updated: 2013-01-22
Packaged: 2017-11-26 12:21:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/650475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dutchydoescoke/pseuds/dutchydoescoke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Kili is thirty-four, clinging to his brother's back, and his first word still has yet to be spoken.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flying

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt at the kink meme:
>
>> Well after he should've started, Kili still doesn't talk. To everyone surprise, however, he will memorize and sing all of the songs he overhears from his mother/brother/uncle/everyone else.
> 
> The title is actually the title of a piece from the soundtrack to Peter Pan, called [Flying](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbg6g8xlbjo), because it is my favorite film score ever. 

Kili is thirty-four, clinging to his brother's back, and his first word still has yet to be spoken. He hums, tunes that he learns from Thorin or Fili or Dis, or even a short song that appeared in his head after visiting his uncle at the forges, but he never speaks.

Kili knows Dis and Thorin worry, and he wants to explain to them that it's okay. He knows words, and he knows how to use them.

But simply speaking just doesn't work right for him. Plain, spoken words just don't sound right.

Fili understands him, understands the language Kili uses, made up of hummed melodies and the occasional tug on Fili's hair, but their mother doesn't, and Thorin doesn't.

Kili sings, instead. His first word is a song on its own, a melody tinging the syllables, when Fili was doing something and Kili wanted his brother's attention.

_"Fili!"_

It's drawn out, the music behind it not unlike the lullabye Fili hums as they curl up in bed at night, and Fili answers it with an identically-sung _"Kili"_ , understanding Kili in the way no one else quite manages.

From then on, Kili sings. He still never speaks, the syllables too flat and boring and plain and so very wrong without music for him, but he'll sing whatever song is in his head, or in his heart, and soon, everyone at least has a basic grasp of Kili's language, even if Fili is the only one to truly understand it, and the only one to understand that music is just part of Kili.

Singing is the way he lets it out, the way he gets people to understand the melody currently in his head. He finds music in everything, from the forges Thorin works in to even his mother sewing by the fireplace. He finds a rhythm, he finds notes, and he sings what he hears. 

He sings the songs Dis sings, and Thorin sings, and the songs Fili teaches him. He sings when skipping his way through Ered Luin or chasing after his brother. Even as he grows, turning forty, then fifty, then sixty and seventy, he never speaks, just sings, just hums.

There is always a song in his head or his heart, always one that fits what he's feeling, aside from one, which he can name, but never sing, because for all Kili's talents with singing and instruments, he cannot put it to music, and at seventy-seven, standing on Bagshot Row, just outside the gate with Fili next to him, he pauses and pulls his brother closer and to face him, leaning their foreheads together and whispering the one word he can't put music to.

_Brother._

Fili smiles, the smug smile of a Dwarf who knows that he's just gotten everything he's ever wanted, and presses his forehead against Kili's again for a moment, quietly singing the same word back to Kili, because while Kili can't express it in music, Fili has associated the emotion with little other than music for as long as he can remember, the tune an old and familiar one.

It's the same song Fili hummed and sang to get Kili to sleep when they were only dwarflings, barely thirty, and it's the same song that tinged Kili's first word. It is the song he associates most with Kili, and it has come to mean "brother" for him over the past seventy-seven years.

Because Kili is music, in a way that nobody but Fili understands.


End file.
